IELTS Test Sections and Calculation of Band Score in IELTS Exam Sections

IELTS Speaking Section

The band score of the speaking section of IELTS is described as follows in four different classes. 

• Coherence and Fluency: 

This category is for people who are master in the English language. To fall into this category, a candidate must have confidence and have to demonstrate comfort in speaking English. And the candidate must be able to answer the questions in the interview with full fluency and coherence. 

• Lexical resource: 

This category assesses the vocabulary of the candidate, whether the candidate is using the idioms and other words correctly or not. 

• Accuracy and range of Grammar: 

To gain a good score in this, you have to use different grammatical forms appropriately and correctly. 

• Pronunciation: 

This class assesses how appropriately the candidate makes the sound of vowel and consonants. Moreover, accurate word stress is also necessary to score well in this category. 

The average score is calculated by averaging the score in each category.

IELTS Writing Section

The IELTS writing section is scored on the basis of four skills listed below.  

• Achievement of the task:  

In order to gain a good score in this category, you must ensure that you have followed all of the instructions and have performed the full task correctly. Moreover, all other classes fall into the class of achievement of the task. 

• Cohesion and Coherence: 

This category measures the cohesion and coherence of the writing. It assesses how greatly the essay is organized, there are transitions or not, writing is clear, supporting details are present, etc. 

• Lexical Resource: 

This section measures the use of appropriate vocabulary words effectively and clearly. 

• Accuracy and range of Grammar: 

In this category, the writing is assessed on the basis of the sentence structure, grammatical accuracy, etc. 

How IELTS bands are calculated?

The rubrics can give you an idea that how IELTS marks are being calculated. But lets now have a deeper look. Let us tell you how different points are summed up and how the band scores are given. 

listening and reading sections in IELTS Exam

The two sections of IELTS that are listening and reading sections, both contain 40 questions each. These 40 questions are exactly one point individually. Moreover, it is the raw score and the raw score depends on how many queries were answered correctly. So, you must be thinking that the conversion from raw score to band score is easy, but sadly it is not the case. Grounded on the certified information it is a tricky one. 

The correct answers percentage you get is not equal to the band point percentage you achieve. For example, if you are having 16 correct answers from 40 questions in a listening test than you have only 40% correct answers. However, the band score you will get will be 5 that is a greater 55.5% of 9 band scores. 

However, the raw points conversion to band scores is unlike in IELTS Academic Reading and General Training IELTS reading. For example, if you get 30 out of 40 questions right in IELTS academic then you will be marked as band 7, however, if you get the same in General training then you will be given band 6.

Apart from this, there is a little bit of confusion in score conversion. This is because the conversion charts that are official cover only 5-8 bands for Academic Reading and listening. And a 4 to 7 band for reading in general training of IELTS. Moreover, the half bands are also not mentioned. As you can not know the bands for raw scores such as 5.5, 6.5 and so on. So, considering this, it is difficult to know what is a decent IELTS score. 

If you want to know about the official chart then you can go to the IELTS website and have all the related information. 

Apart from this, there are different unofficial charts. These charts show the conversion of raw scores into bands. But you have to be careful while trusting these charts as they may not be according to the official scoring methods. These charts may not show if your IELTS score is good or not. 

One of our favorite charts is from the Wikipedia article. It matches the information from IELTS.org. Moreover, it is grounded on the unauthorized calculator to calculate the band score. Although it is not sponsored officially, it is quite reliable. 

Speaking and Writing in IELTS Exam

Scores of the IELTS speaking and writing section depends upon the speaking and writing rubrics. People who are trained in calculating the IELTS score use rubrics in order to estimate the band score directly instead if using raw scores to calculate the band score. 

So the question is that what kind of rubrics do the scorers who score IELTS exam use in order to calculate the band score? Well, these rubrics are not usually available to the public. However, the values of the rubrics are not a secret. They are built on descriptions of IELTS bands that are officially available for IELTS speaking and writing.